More Moment With Bob

The massacre is known as the Asiatic vespers. It is suggested that this massacre was to insure loyalty, because all those cities who participated in the massacre couldn't switch sides for fear of Roman reprisal.

The connection I made to Creeley through disconcerting him lasted only a moment, but for me, those meeting of the minds are rare, and nearly an abstraction. Even today, this very small event in my life with a minor movement poet is a living embodiment in my psyche, just as Jerry is, and my resentment of my own infantile sensibility of that fact; not that it is constant, nor exotic, indeed, this is worship built upon earlier foundations with other authority figures whom I manipulated. I wanted to marry my high school history teacher, who was Italian, and he, dear fellow, made the mistake of getting personally involved with my family. Why? He saw my potential, and my damage, and tried to rescue me for the Ivy League. I obsessed over his elegance, his couture and style, the ability of his limpid eyes to emote, and this is where much of my glittering self-loathing comes from. I cannot break the Platonic ideal and settle for the horror of sexual intimacy with a man like Frank. I am not claiming exceptionalism, only that my investments in what and who I cannot have, this too, has left me an angel of vengeance being destroyed by compliance models that only have my best interests at heart.

I want to be fillet mignon, and at best, I am a tasty salisbury steak with an extended clitoris and pubic hair which refuses dainty arousal, only wearied by loss of lubrication, and dryness, which, should I actually meet some decent bastard who can read me, and figure I am not that bad, this late in season, will have to be addressed. I know what it is to fuck stupidly, and then fuck slightly better with borrowed husbands, but I have never had the wonder of loving abandon. Frank did try, but I hated him from the beginning, and that was my mistake, believing I could repress my scathing contempt for a stupid mestizo from the Bronx simply so I could flee my supervisor's revealing intimacy.

How I survived this without going my brother's route and injecting myself to death with PCP, I do not know what to deem it, an accomplishment?

I do not want a doctorate, not any more; yes, it places me at a disadvantage, but at this stage of the game, that degree of focus and concentration offers little immunity from heading toward, or warding off, the corrosion of irreversible, traumatic, decline.

To augment this seasonal garnish, "The Crow" was my own discovery, before the imprinting of my own idolatry; it was coincidence that Jerry studied with the Beat to whom I was most responsive, and ironically, in a submission I cannot remember, rejected my work, I think before I went to his reading, and subsequent lecture on a poet Alan Dugan, a man whom I've yet to expore.

Qualis artifex pereo

"You have the wrong Secretary." Senator John Kerry's immortal words to the spastic_dowager before he added more plumage to his stature.


Ambulatory individuals often find me humorous when I am intensely serious: "Dr. Creeley you taught someone who was a great influence on me!" I drove up to his table as if I were an ankle monitor ready to latch onto him, and to my great surprise, he burst out into a full throated  laugh that made me love him instantly. I did not tell him his poem about killing crows determined the miserable course of my life, and I am starting to weep because Robert is dead, and even if I wanted to run to Jerry, to beg him not to die before me, to beg him to forgive me, to cry and cry on the shoulder of this habituated post modernist Shakespearean of whom I expected a more debonair career end, what good would it do? I am not quite ready to compare Hilter to Joan d'Arc, but the corrosion of poverty, the ignorance and ugliness of the human animal when compared to the beauty of other species we kill near indiscriminately due to lack of equitable distribution of resources and our inability to come up with pragmatic solutions, the fact that a good man never loved me, even if no binary partnership makes for completion, I have been up since noon yesterday, in the post-solstice of December, and I am exhausted, in the recurring motif of over-extension, too dark for anyone not to believe I need a leash, losing my track of acerbic tone, what is it I expect from posting like this? Later.

The later.

Sickness is the hatred of repentance... The poem is "The Crow" and it is in a smaller post-Vietnam collection of Creeley's work, less massive than the tome I purchased when he came to Philadelphia to wank our literary cunts. Robert is not my favorite poet, and on the whole the Beats are more vapor than substance, but "The Crow" is one of my favorite poems reflecting the exhaustion of the 20th century, much like De Niro's failed attempt at wit with the First Couple reflects the exhaustion of Western Imperialism finally giving way before Orientalism. It seems to have been settled with at least some veracity, that Barack is a typical progressive centrist, and I am not suggesting otherwise, but his mother seems to have been infected with John Lennon's bong paraphernalia, and piques my interest more than her disappointing golden child. In my initial post on this topic, near the close of my monetized account, I punned De Niro and Nero, and only upon revision realized this was more intuitive than the lazy carelessness of sarcasm.

Jerry cannot absolve in me what I cannot forgive in myself. I lost my bid to succeed as an American, case closed, the unforgiven in the mistakes of impulse. Pallid, my dour mother's bitter mouth inscribed on my expression like a destructive Artemis, sixty pounds too much of a belly in a stout frame, I am not apologizing to you or anyone else anymore for not reigning it in according to propriety, but, being tired, and Christmas stressed nine months of posts ahead, I shall refine this analysis as luxury allows, three cigarettes closer to cancer. I don't care.